Content Channels

User Actions

Ice (Cream) Queen: Jeni Britton Bauer on Her New Cookbook, Repping the Midwest, and Being Normcore

by Epicurious Editors

on 05/22/14 at 03:30 PM

David Tamarkin reports from Chicago.

Ice cream addicts are freaking out this week, and here's why: Jeni Britton Bauer, the punky Ohioan behind Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams, has just released her new book Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream Desserts. In her last book (the James Beard Award-winning Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams At Home), Bauer accomplished a seemingly impossible task: recipes for homemade ice creams that were actually creamy, not icy.

This time, she tackles projects to make with those ice creams: cakes, cocktails and lots of sauces and crumbles ("gravels," in Jenispeak) with which to create sundaes. It's a book for sugar fiends and for anybody with any connection to the Midwest (trust this Ohio-born writer when he tells you she's something of a hero). But it's also a book for design freaks. The clean, color-blocked pages do nothing to hide the drippy, messy, lopsided desserts on the pages--and that, Bauer told me in a series of phone calls and emails, is exactly the point.

What were your brainstorms like when you were planning the look of this book?

First of all, we wanted everything to look like it was on a dessert cart. Like it was an option. Like you could reach through the pages and grab it. Like you could make that. So nothing is overstyled. We plopped everything together, the same way you would at home--not tweezing it, you know? So it becomes sort of a visual menu.

I didn't want it to be too brandy. I wanted it to feel open-ended, versus closed-in and all-about-us. You have the ultimate freedom to get in and out of the book however you want and however it applies to your life, and at that moment. I think tha's very normcore--that you can be one thing today and another thing tomorrow. You know, you could make meat ice cream with my recipes, if you want to. You can make something extreme. Or you can make a beautiful vanilla.

I think it's particularly apropos given the announcement about the Beard awards to talk about the Midwest a bit. You’re one of the most high profile artisans working in the Midwest right now, and you make a point of sort of spreading the gospel about your region. Is this a crusade you’re on, or is it just what you naturally talk about?

Both. I come from the Midwest, the Midewst is part of my DNA, how I grew up. And the more I read about it--and I've read a lot about it in the last year--the more interested I become. But I also feel that it's so misunderstood, even within the Midwest, and I'd love to help change that.

I guess it's always been something I've talked about but just didn't get a lot of traction on. And I feel that right now, with all the other things happening, like when Amy [Thielen]'s book came out, I was like, oh my gosh, the pieces are finally starting to come together, let's get out there and keep pushing this.

So five years ago, people weren’t listening as much?

It was a non-starter, I'd say. Even when I was pitching the first book, people couldn't believe that there was anything like this in Columbus, Ohio. And it's like, well, we've been in business since 1996. And people just don't pay attention to it. I think even in the Midwest we don't pay attention to ourselves, often.

But the first book ended up selling very well.

It sold really well. It blew everybody's mind. Except, you know, ours. We thought, this is going to sell really well because we're teaching people how to make ice cream that actually works at home, and I know that everybody wants to make ice cream. We knew it would sell well, but it was a very hard sell for everybody else to hear. And then it won the James Beard Award, and did very well. It even did well in Germany.

Makes sense. Germans appreciate good design.

Well, they redesigned it. And it's pretty cool. They took all the heart and soul out of it, but it's actually really awesome. It's really minimal. And they renamed it "Das Best Eis der Welt," which means "The Best Ice Cream In The World." And...that's the extent of my German.

Is there another book in the works?

No, Writing a book is the hardest thing. Doing all the recipes, testing them all, it's so complicated and difficult. The funny thing is I wrote the first book with the idea that you will never need another ice cream book, and so therefore I never need to write any other ice cream book again. But then it was like, we have all these other ideas! So we had to write another book. And that's fun and fine, but I feel exhausted again. I don't have any other ideas. But who knows what will happen in a year, you know?